


Helping Hand

by VoyagerSoa



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Adventure, Enemies to Lovers, Genderfluid Character, Other, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-08 14:45:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18625387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoyagerSoa/pseuds/VoyagerSoa
Summary: Loki Laufeyson is the most wanted criminal in all of Midgard. Stephen Strange is Sorcerer Supreme of Earth--and once got his job stolen by none other than the God of Mischief. Working together seems totally impossible. It isn't. But it is hard as Hel.





	1. Not Your Maniac Pixie Dream God

Greenwich Village.

A regular Wednesday for one Stephen Strange, which was to say he’d been spending it busy with banishing away astral parasites only he could see, keeping a pulse on the return of magic itself and now checking in with the locals. Recent habit on the latter—one that’d also flourished in the wake of the Sanctum Sanctorum almost being sold to businessmen in league with demons that he squeaked through only with the help of the people.

Right then:

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Schmidt, there’s goblins in your garden stealing your… tomatoes?”

“Yes!” She set her glasses, opening the door and beckoning him inside. “I know how silly it sounds, but dear, you must come and see.”

“It’s my pleasure, Mrs. Schmidt.” Stephen had to duck to meet clearance. “Merely making sure I had that right. I’m confident I’ve seen stranger.”

_I have got to stop using that line with civilians…_

He was out doing what he loved.

The Cloak of Levitation unfurled from its station as a bright scarf to around Stephen’s shoulders proper, Mrs. Schmidt leading him on through her tiny inlet on an older Greenwich street. Constructed sometime in the fifties and giving the distinct impression as though not much had been done to it since, complete with salmon colored decorating and original floral wallpaper, Stephen found it charming. Mrs. Schmidt lead him on a slight hobble, but used no cane, her hair fixed in a graying updo. When she turned to address him in the middle of the pinkest kitchen he’d ever seen, her head scarcely reached his chest.

“Yup, a goblins problem. Little buggers,” she said. “Sneaky. My old tired eyes can’t see them well, but I know it’s them with those nasty little giggles. Don’t know what they want with my tomatoes, but I don’t have a garden for feeding a couple of walking warts.”

“I see.”

“It’s good of you to ask if you could help,” Mrs. Schmidt added. “I would’ve called myself, but I don’t want to be a bother for you. I know you’re busy, Mister Strange.”

“Doctor, if you would.”

“Oh yes, forgive me. You just don’t look like a doctor, you know… Doctor. Not one I’d call for hot flashes, at least.”

“Used to be, although that was a long time ago. These days I’m the only one left that still makes house calls. Life’s interesting like that, Mrs. Schmidt. Can you tell me anything else about your goblin issue?”

“They come out around now, actually,” she said. “Portals they use, tiny yellow ones to jump in and out of, laughing to themselves as they take my beautiful tomatoes to who-knows-where. I’d be flattered, but I prefer the flattery of my sauces, personally.”

“That’s fair of you. Your oven on?”

“Cookies.” She wore a weathered, honest grin. “Don’t worry any about that, dear. Garden’s right here.” Fumbling with the lock for a moment—it’d been an old screen door that ached—she managed to yank it until it groaned wide, coming out into a stoned terrace scarely any larger than a single plot of corn Stephen would’ve recognized back home. He realized her problem instantly.

The old nanny’s terrace was on top of a ley line! Stephen had no doubt the regrowth of magic in and around Greenwich and beyond wasn’t going to be regular to what it was like before—ley lines in new places, concetrating mystical energy in areas that might have been all but bereft only a few years ago. There were wonderful aura shades of white, periwinkle even, awash in splatters of mint and lavender. He hypothesized the ley line had to have been causing her plants to flourish for ways they never had before and someone else beside the nanny was taking dividends. Stephen walked around, thumbing fingers in the air where he sensed past mystical entrances and exits.

“Mrs. Schmidt,” he said, “I want to investigate more thoroughly. Don’t mind me if I don’t respond for a few minutes.”

“Sure thing, dear. I’ll be inside checking on the cookies while you’re working.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Schmidt.” And then his soul unwound into the astral, vision alight with that furious color.

A ley line of some strength, too. Stephen was about to cast a spell to draw the ley line’s power such that he might examine it in detail when—

—a portal the size of his hand popped open behind a ripe tomato in its spine, out stepping a creature whose skin was like rust and face like pig, not any bigger than a foot as it came packed with a nasty pierced ear and similarly dimuitive knife. They were about to do their business chopping off the tomato when they blinked their eyes wide open until they were marbles at seeing Stephen in his astral form. Although these words were in goblin-speak, a minor ward of translation gave this:

“Oh fuck, _it’s you!_ ”

He stopped them with a spell of minor paralysis before they could escape.

“Yes, it’s me,” he agreed, unimpressed. “Let me guess. Old woman doesn’t know what she has and you and your clan have been stealing to exact the energy from her vegetables to sell it back on the black market for a mint and more.”

“Umm.” The goblin tried to shrug. “It’s a good livin’. Especially since you killed all the magic.”

“Since the _Imperator_ killed all the magic, you mean. Everything I’ve done is to make sure it’s given a chance to return, and I don’t have any profits in mind except the ones everyone may enjoy.”

Beat.

“I don’t enjoy the lecturin’.”

Rolling his eyes, Stephen returned to his physical form. He watched as the goblin struggled against the spell like a fly in a jar while he thought about this. Practically not a soul save for the goblins themselves liked goblins, and the death of magic had done precious little in displacing their stranglehold on nearly every occult market on the planet. The kinds frequented by witches, sorcerers, and kids with Ouija boards alike. But the goblins rarely if ever did anything outright illegal—for what laws that exist in a community mostly about subverting reality—and they always, somehow, always managed to have whatever you needed most in stock even if they wanted you to pay out the nose for it. Like it or not, they were a tiny, unscrupulous, ruthlessly capitalistic necessary evil.

And Stephen doubted any would listen even if the Sorcerer Supreme declared this woman’s garden off limits. So after requisite pinching of the nose, he reached out to the goblin and said:

“Sign here.”

The goblin was in awe. “Tae hell are you askin’ me?”

“Sign here,” repeated Stephen, holding out a pinch sized piece of paper. “You’ll be allowed to have half this woman’s garden, but with the expectation of compensation from you and the rest of your clan. Are we clear?”

Releasing the goblin from his spell, they huffed and took out a pen no longer than a fingernail to sign it.

“And you won’t bother us?”

“And I won’t bother you.”

“Good business to you, Sorcerer Supreme,” they said, then swiped the tomato and ran into a slipstream, a handful of gold coins plopping down in their wake.

Stephen didn’t stop them. _How am I going to explain this to her…?_

He returned to Mrs. Schmidt lording over her doughy constructs and tried to key her in the best he was able. She was briefly cut up over now having to lease half of an already impoverished terrace to a warren of the knife-eared bastards, but accepted knowing now at least she’d have any tomatoes to spare instead of whatever she managed to cook before being unduly stolen. And the idea of gold coins and trinkets happened to be universally appealing.

“Should they ever violate their end of the agreement, call me,” he told her. “They might be obsessed with growing their fortunes, but even they have to heed their contracts.”

“I’ll be sure to. You’re a good man, Doctor. Can’t believe any businessmen wanted to sell your house to themselves out from under you. Did you see those papers they spun up? About you being a servant of Satan?”

“None that I missed,” he said. “I’m very thankful you and everyone else in the Village didn’t believe them, Mrs. Schmidt. It’s good to be here, helping the local community where I can.”

“You can say that again! There’s just noe enough of you anymore. I’m an old crone, Doctor, and I’ve been here since the beginning of having lads in spadex run about the place. Seems like the only thing they ever do anymore is take interviews on the T.V. and tell us how they saved us all from fallin’ robots or some such thing and we got the same grief we ever had on our streets with nobody coming to help. You see?”

“I do.” Stephen placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Be seeing you, Mrs. Schmidt. Hopefully your goblin troubles will be much less. Enjoy the coins.”

“I will. Be seeing you too, Doctor. Wait—the c—”

As if to interject, a transponder on Stephen’s wrist glowed bright blue. He, grimacing, excused himself before she had a chance to finish the thought, teleporting himself to the husk in the Arctic whose dead Celestial body made home to the newest edition of Avenger’s Tower.

It’d be an understatement to say Stephen didn’t particularly enjoy any of this.

There was the Tower itself—and really, calling it “Avengers” Tower was a misnomer inasmuch for how much Stark technology and interior decorating dominated everything—which put Stephen on edge. He thought it foul to clean out the insides of a Celestial and park shop inside it without much consideration if any for the probable implications. And then there was the engineer-billionaire himself…

“This better be good, Stark. I’ve told you before that I’m on reserves only. Is the sky about to be falling?”

Tony, seated on one of the Tower’s many Stark Resilient branded gear had surprise written all over his face.

“Oh. Uh. That was fast.”

Stephen was unamused. “The transponder was blue.”

“Right. Uh… Let me call Steve and we’ll talk business. It’s another HYDRA offshoot in Siberia,” Tony explained, sending up a hologram.

“HYDRA offshoot?” Call him less than impressed. “What does a HYDRA offshoot have to do with me? Are they hoarding a cache of magical artifacts?”

“None we know of.” Tony snapped to his wrist, saying something into it, presumably to Steve. A moment beside and sure enough, the man in the big red white and blue shored up with shield in tow.

“Good to see you, Stephen,” he greeted. Stephen said nothing.

“Anyway, it’s our old friend HYDRA. Or at least formerly HYDRA,” Tony continued. “You know. Typical warmongering and general evildoing. Why they’re hiding out in Siberia is anyone’s guess, and I’d really rather nip this in the bud before Hill comes out and puts her foot in my ass for slacking off to her tastes. You understand?”

“I’m not seeing the part where I come into this, Stark,” Stephen replied, touch curt. His arms were crossed. “I don’t know where you people have gotten it into your heads that I’m a permanent playing piece in your merry band of superheroes. Plainly, I have other things do be doing. If magic isn’t involved, I’d rather you let me return to it. Get into a helicarrier and be done with it. Now if you’ll allow me—”

Tony cut him off. “Oh, off with it, Strange! If we had a helicarrier, we’d be using a helicarrier. But when Loki decided to make it rain dead Celestials from the sky, the majority of Avengers related infrastructure was destroyed. I’ve got top men working around the clock for repairs, but we’ve still time to burn before we see anything like what we had. Especially with SHIELD having to go toothless these days. You think I like the fact we’re hiding out in the Arctic like rogues?”

Stephen sighed, rubbing his forehead. When did the Avengers become such a headache? He missed the days where they stayed clear of each other save for the most important of emergencies. By the Vishanti, he himself had been neutral in the superpowered Civil War!

“I am not your, or the Avenger’s tour bus, Stark. Translocation is not a one and done spell, least of all with multiple people involved. It can go wrong. I can point it at Siberia and have you wind up in another dimension entirely. Am I to believe you have no other method of mass transport? None whatsoever? Now that I doubt.”

Steve decided now was his time to come in. “Have us loose this once, Stephen. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong. But you’re able to do it, and it’s the fastest option we have on the table currently. Are you going to tell me you’re fine with HYDRA being out there simply because they don’t toe often into your line of work?”

“What I’m not fine with is your people calling me in for what they shouldn’t, Rogers! Grief…” He turned around. “This once.” Needling a finger into his wrist until he’d pulled the metal, blinking hunk of scrap free, Stephen left it at his feet. “Take your transponder, Stark. Do not contact me again.” A translocation spell consumed both Stark and Rogers, shipping them off to Siberia without so much a goodbye or thank you; Stephen took a portal back home.

There were cookies on his doorstep.

Stephen took the platter and looked into the emblem window of the Sanctum Sanctorum, evening tinting the brick exterior in a contemplative sort of orange. The Sanctum was far and away the oldest building in Greenwich, having predated the borough’s founding. He didn’t know when exactly it’d been first built, as the Sanctum had fallen and risen and fallen again to fill several novels’ worth of spoils. It was, above its erecting atop a Native American burial ground and general mystique, home. Holding the knob of the front door cooled him down enough to turn it and head inside… to…

_Oh, no._

That was not a thin, lithe man lounging in his foyer as though he owned it while sipping from Stephen’s prized bottle of spiced bourbon. He did not come complete with nattered coat and fraying cufflinks and lacquered nails. He wasn’t pale as snow with bright emerald eyes and hair like an inky mop. Those were not the most recognizeable pair of horns this realm over on his head.

Except he was. He was everything of that and more and he was here.

 _You have got to be **kidding** me. _Out from the frying pan and into the fire, eh, Strange?

“Loki…” He sounded even more exhausted than he was with Stark. “If you’re looking to turn yourself in, I’m afraid you just missed your stop. I’m not dealing with the Avengers for a while. Go up into the Arctic and do it yourself. Make sure to say hello.”

As if to confirm he was real and in the flesh, Loki sounded off a chuckle so smarmy only he could have ever done it, coaxing another shot of bourbon from the bottle to down it in a single motion. His legs were making themselves at ease on a nearby ottoman, himself acknowledging Stephen with a smirk.

“Funny. Although it doesn’t surprise me much at all you’ve had enough of that rabble already—we’ve always shared at least some similar sentiments concerning gaggles of superheroes, the gossiping hens. Unfortunately, I’m not here for anything such as turning myself in. It’s a fine drink you have here, better than what I was left with last I lived in the Sanctum. Did you take it when you moved out? Also… Zelma’s not here.”

“She’s doing her own thing now,” Stephen said, choosing his battle carefully. “Cut to the chase, Loki, before I banish you. I’m not in the mood, less for villanious monologues.” He snatched the bottle from him to conjure another shot glass and pour some for himself. “Trying to rule the world again? Anymore Dark Celestials up your sleeve?”

“Actually…” His mercurial eyes were shining. “I need your help, Stephen.”

And out went the bourbon.

“You _what?”_

“It isn’t any easier for me to admit. But, ‘tis true, I am in need of help and expertise. My seidr sadly isn’t what it once was at the moment.”

“I’m not about to diagnose you, Loki. Your power, your bag of cats. And besides, you deserved whatever it was the Celestials did to you to start with.”

Loki scoffed. “If it were as simple as that, I’d have never come, you know. No, Strange, what I need your help with isn’t too complicated. Where the forces of magic in Midgard currently undergo renewal, it’s hardly coming up sunshine and roses for others.” He evened out his look. “Other dimensions are dying on the vine still. One of which I owe a great debt to.”

“You don’t think I know that?” Stephen was incredulous. “Loki, I’m aware of every planar dimension down to the corners of the Multiverse that are withering or at risk of dying. I also know there’s no possible way to save them all. Some are honestly better off gone. Like it or not, magic proliferated on this plane—specifically this planet—in ways that had a knock-on effect here and beyond when the Imperator decided to try his hand at killing it. But I am one Sorcerer Supreme, and mine is of Earth. If I can barely help in our own backyard without some demon from another realm trying to litigate then attempt to kill me for my house, how am I to help in tens if not hundreds of dimensions separate from this one?”

Loki seemed to at least listen. But he had only a word to say: “Arcadia.”

_Here we go._

Stephen lipped his shot glass. “Realm of the Faerie.” He started to drink. “I’m not surprised you have something going on with them. But it’s been to my knowledge that the fae are getting on better than most, what with Arcadia’s innate connection to Earth. Even if that’s changed, why should I help you, Loki? You’re looking to settle a debt. Debt or no debt, you’re you. Probably the most wanted criminal everywhere that’s heard of you since that Celestial business—it’s taking more than an insignificant amount of restraint not sending you to the Negative Zone right now.”

“Well, Stephen, here’s the thing…”

He braced himself.

“…Arcadia wants me crowned king.”

Although he’d hung onto his bourbon this time, the intent to send it splattering a second go was obvious. He stared at Loki though he just spouted three heads and began spouting fire. Actually, him having done that would’ve been somehow less jarring than what he’d just been told.

“Uh…” He fumbled for the words. “Care to explain…?”

“It was millennia ago now, you understand. When the Faerie were strong on Midgard. I’d been on Midgard myself for some decades in the form of a woman, feeling disconnected with my heritage and the other gods. Traveling from Norway to England, the Faerie took fast notice, seeing though each of my glamors though I’d done no more than put on a few linen shirts. They knew me and I knew them. I soon received an invitation into Arcadia for interest of how a foreigner god could be so alike to them. And then…” Loki shrugged. “…As much as I enjoyed the jaunt, I returned to Asgard as they knew me some decades later. Apparently the Faerie haven’t forgotten me since I left, and troubling times has left them with the want for taking me ‘home’.”

“Mhm.” Stephen went for more drink, only to make the mournful discovery that Loki had gone through more than half the bottle before he’d even come home, nary a drop left in the thing. Figures. The day he gets a break, Hell’s going to freeze over. “So you did **something** with the Faerie centuries ago, a **something** the likes of which I’m sure will come up later, preferably when I’m staring it in the face and no sooner, and because the going’s got tough for them they want you crowned king, implication being they won’t take no for an answer.” He paused, considering it. “Is this an ex situation. Are we dealing with an ex of yours, Loki? Because this—”

“Quiet, Stephen, and let me finish.” Hardly the most reassurring Loki could’ve afforded to be, but Stephen leaned back and at least for now let him have at it.

“The Faerie want me, but more precisely, they want my body,” he explained. “For as briefly as I lived in Arcadia in the timeline of a god, it nevertheless changed me as Arcadia changes any number of its tenants. Not in any way visible, of course, but the mark of the Faerie is one I’ve carried ever since. It’s to my belief they want me ‘crowned’ only in a crude sense of the word. I expect such a crowning would be closer akin to sacrificing me so the seidr in my blood might restore the lands they’ve lost since their connection to Midgard has grown so tenuous.”

“Not a mark easily removed, I take it.”

Loki was cavalier. “None whatsoever. The Faerie are not known for letting go. Perhaps at the height of my power I could have cast it off without my untimely demise, but it never occurred to me then and is naught but impossible now.” He swirled the remainder of bourbon around in his glass. “I’ve already had to fend off rather the league of would-be kidnappers.”

 _Hmph._ Stephen fingered for a sneer. Far from the first that Loki’s ever been hunted, but he understood you could be chased by only so many entities at once before one was sure to land a hit that was going to stick. He wanted to cover his ass. And now he was here, bargaining with the Sorcerer Supreme for help, a Sorcerer Supreme he’d not too long ago tricked out of his station to regale Stephen with the weird and not-so-wonderful world of Loki at the helm and not himself. Bastard.

“Listen, Loki,” he started. “Say I want to help you—and in the interest of being honest, I don’t—how would I change this? You’d have to go to Arcadia and sort this out yourself. Besides, I’m to believe that if they did sacrifice you it’d be the end of you for good? After how many trips to the Void you’ve gone through? Please. Now you’re just wasting my time.” He stood. “Did you steal anything while I was out? Better yet, how in Hell did you get _in_ here without setting off at least twenty of my wards?”

“Come now, Stephen. Haven’t you dealt with worse and walked out the same man?” Loki was unconvinced. “But if you must, name your price. Who am I to know your deepest desires? Maybe you’d like to do it out of spite for our friends the Avengers, or that I’m handsome and could with certainty scratch your back later—”

“—You are not handsome, Loki.” Stephen furrowed his brows. “You’ve got a black mop for hair and atrocious fashion combined with gremlin chic. Don’t give me that.”

“If that’s the line you choose to get defensive over, I beg to differ.” Describing him as amused at Stephen’s sudden fury was putting it mildly. “In any case, I would owe you a great deal. Is that not something to admire having from one God of Mis—ulp—”

And Loki was gone, now swimming somewhere in the Negative Zone. Stephen, for his part, simply sighed.

“Good riddance.” He was looking wistful at the empty bottle of bourbon, forced to set off for the kitchenette. “Have to settle with coffee, I suppose.” Plus whatever aberrant abomination he knew as food still lurked in the fridge. Poor Mrs. Schmidt had no idea he couldn’t eat her cookies without manning the porcelain throne for a good hour. For the record, with how he felt, he might’ve done so anyway if only for a few gasping seconds of chocolatey goodness. Alas, his was black beans and water.

Stephen dreamed of nothing.

He returned to the Village the following day at noon, helping a father whose daughter had astral mice crawling in and out of her ears. He didn’t hear anything from the Avengers and came home to the Sanctorum wielding a bouquet of flowers from another appreciative neighor, having almost forgotten that Loki had been here yesterday were he not now in the same exact spot he was before Stephen had banished him.

“As I was,” Loki was saying as though he hadn’t missed a beat, “Our first stop will be none other than Stonehenge.”


	2. Stonehenge

So, how did Loki—resident prince of Jotunheim, God of Mischief, part-time supervillain and part-time savior of everything with that jaunt a while back as God of Stories—come to realize that none other than Stephen Strange, probably the person that most closely resembled a “nemesis” these days as though Loki had any of those, was the only one man or entity able to help out with this Arcadia problem?

“I am _**not**_ asking _**him**_ for help!”

It wouldn’t come easily.

“And who else do you have to suggest?” His familiar’s tone was as much quizzical as it was biting, coming from the shape of a magpie perched at the windowsill of his room overlooking the rest of icy, misbegotten Jotunheim. “Whether you want to realize it or not, the gods won’t do it. Midgard—the last realm worth anything beside this one—is much the same. Not as though playing part of the villain yet again with those Dark Celestials was popular among the mortals, necessary as it may have been.”

Loki, who’d been holding his face, felt his eyes threaten to roll into the back of his head. “Is this, pray tell, what _**I**_ sounded like when I was the magpie whispering impossible truths? By the Norns.”

“I’m still you,” said the magpie. “You made me. Presumably as talking to oneself in a less metaphorical manner would’ve been too on the nose for your tastes. Unless you’d rather speak to the court of dead past selves?”

He huffed. “Spare me. I can only handle being called some dead Loki’s ‘worthless copy’ a time so many before the entire experience starts to invert on itself. Bitter bastards. Call me what they like, I’m still the only one among us that’s managed a trip to the Void and walked out on top.”

The magpie tittered. “Is this what you call being _on top_ , Loki?” It ignored his glare. “Debating yourself in the mouse house your trueblood father’s given you in his ice castle? While the rest of the Nine—sorry, _Ten_ Realms wish you dead, preferably with head on pike?” Fluttering its wings, its squawk erred on a laugh. “Perhaps this is why you made me. Telling yourself reality so you might at last not forget where we are and what juncture we’re standing on.”

Loki wanted to spit a barb back at the thing, but found nothing for purchase. The bird was right. His room here in Jotunheim was scarcely any larger than the apartment he had in Manhattan that neighbored Verity. It was inundated to the brim of excess, lamp-lights, bits and baubles of just about anything that held his passing interest. A hoarder’s hole, for he’d lost completely the motivation for so much as the ghost of organization in the wake of hit after hit. Malekith’s War of the Realms. Now Arcadia’s Loki-hunting. He couldn’t even take pride in the empty Infinity Gauntlet sitting aloft in a pile against the south wall, spoil of when Gamora folded reality in two.

“I play the cards I’m dealt,” he finally said, carrying a softer edge. “And my deck has become nothing short of eye-wateringly terrible ever since Reed Richards stitched the Multiverse back together. I’m sure once Thor and the merry band of Avengers kill that bloody elf I’ll have more to work with. As is, well…”

Loki bit his lip.

“Laufey never had an ice castle, you know,” he decided to divert into.

The magpie merely stared in its avian way. “Of course I know that—I’m you, remember?”

“Quiet, you vile bird, lest I have enough and dispel you.” Despite it, he continued. “All this,”—then a finger was pointing to the ceiling, the floor, and around—“is revisionism. When I was a boy, the best our King Laufey had was the largest mud hut in a village of mud huts. And he and his giants were never this tall. I may be… significantly smaller than average, but to now come up barely to the knees? Ridiculous.”

“The Norns are dead.” The bird was not phased in the least. “Our history has started to unravel without them. What of it? It should be better for us. Not as though we were much trying at all to not be entirely malicious and vile until recently. Less consistent the story, more willing they are to believe that we have changed.”

“Issue being that I am no longer telling a lie.” Loki stared out the window. “We—I—have changed. But the parts destiny wills us to play have not. To borrow a mortal saying, I have become a square peg being forced through a round hole. I stole Stephen’s role as Sorcerer Supreme fully cognizant of what he’d do to get it back and come out of it more prepared for when the Dark Celestials came.”

“The very same Dark Celestials we summoned,” the bird chirped lowly. “Or have you already forgotten?”

“They were always going to come,” Loki insisted. “I chose to sprung them when Midgard was strongest.”

The bird just tittered.

“You know Stephen is the only one who’d believe you,” it said, flapping its wings again. “You’re convincing yourself right now. Would I be here if you weren’t? So out with it, Loki! Arcadia is coming for you and your seidr is failing for reasons you yourself won’t grasp quick enough before they get you! That sorcerer is our only option. Now would you get us out of this horrible room? Where has the gone the eye for decoration?” It was squawking in disbelief. “You’re losing yourself and spending it moping.”

Loki said nothing, gripping the windowsill with burgeoning intent. It wasn’t as though he could argue with himself, even if he preferred not giving that blasted magpie version of him the satisfaction of agreement. In spite of his and Stephen’s countless quarrels and battles over these last few months, he remained the sole Avenger, or Avengers-adjacent that would in the least be willing to hear Loki’s side of the story, to lend a helping hand, no matter how tenuous that hand would be. And it was help he needed. Arcadia might have been damaged with the brief destruction of magic on Midgard, but the Faerie were nothing short of relentless. They would keep coming and coming and coming still until something had been done about to to put an end to this for good. He was in no shape to do it alone.

And then in slid a thought. _Verity…_

He couldn’t help himself. What would she have made of this? Verity would be livid, of course. Loki, peaking with that God of Stories bit, just to let it sift through the fingers. Being like this, moping in the tower of a father that never loved him and ranting to himself as if it mattered, he was proving that abominable King Loki right. If a trickster god couldn’t do something as simple as let fly the chains of destiny and make it stick, he heard in his voice, what good of a trickster god really was he?

_Ugh._

“To Hel with this.” He and the bird were gone. “I’m hunting a cyclops.”

Somewhere in Olympia, while Doctor Strange works away at goblins stealing magical tomatoes.

We should inform you that while the idea of murdering a cyclops was far and away the most active action Loki had decided to undergo since this whole business started (compared to moping about in his room) it was not, in actuality, the best idea he’s ever had. It would however make the bottom ten. And if you’re asking how that could be, listen in for yourself:

“ _ **LOKI LAUFEYSON! I KNOW YOUR NAME! AND WHEN I AM DONE, NONE SHALL KNOW YOU FROM BONE OR ENTRAILS!**_ ”

We think the cyclopean made this self-explanatory.

Oh, it’d been a plan halfway decent on its face. Go to some forgotten corner of holy Olympia, slay a cyclops and cut out its eye for which he could use later in a ritual for scrying Arcadia such that he wouldn’t have to play darts with a board he couldn’t even see. Loki had felled worse before and done so almost effortlessly—for the gods’ sake, he’s killed troll kings and dragons. But the God of Mischief, even at his lowest, was arrogant. Enough to not care about a single detail that was now burning through his mind as he ran boulder to boulder dodging under the cyclops’s almighty mace.

His seidr?

It wasn’t working.

“Not willing for parley anymore, I take it,” said the magpie perched on Loki’s shoulder, himself making another sprint. “Maybe a more neutral entrance? Rather than laughing at him and challenging him to sculpt a better pot than yourself, your head for victory and his eye for failure, as though he’d do anything but be enranged when he inevitably lost to just kill us instead. Is the seidr fizzling again?”

Loki scarcely heard the thing as he was too breathless and busy diving out of the way in avoiding a mace strike that would’ve rendered them both Loki-giblets. The magpie kept on talking as if the whole thing were no more intense than a walk outside in a mild breeze. “That’s never happened before… not in at least a thousand years. The Celestials were thorough punishing you. You know, you could always summon Laevateinn…”

It was referring to Loki’s ancestral blade, a sword of chaos imbibed with countless runes and a cutting edge that was a rust shade of red. Once upon a time, Laevateinn would’ve been a key part of Loki the Younger’s arsenal. But Laevaeteinn was unwieldy even for him, what with a propensity of randomly melting into a whip and sometimes turning invisible among other less than useful effects (chaos runes did not heed the commands of even chaos gods), just to keep it interesting. But more importantly than any of his reservations about it, it didn’t require so much as a drop of functioning seidr to do its work.

His other choice, of course, was becoming a green and gold splotch on the earth.

Loki, gathering enough of his breath to yell the runic incantation necessary in summoning the sword, had it materialize in his hand to immediately thrust it point first into the cyclops’s hulking stomach.

It stopped. Stirred. Then laughed loud enough to echo from the cave and out into the heavens.

“That.” It grabbed Laevateinn by the blade. “Tickl—”

An arc of pure energy snapped from Laevateinn, blowing into the cyclops’s face and throwing them a good couple yards. Loki at last could stop his frantic running.

“Good chaos sword…” And promptly fell to his knees in exhaustion.

The magpie slipped loose from his shoulder to fly over toward the defeated cyclops. It pecked a bit and its head, though for what precisely Loki couldn’t see from where he was. Then it tittered and looked at him.

He wasn’t smiling.

“What is it _now?_ We killed that blasted creature. I’ll use the sword to carve the eye out before it gets any ideas and be done with this mess. Remind me to never return to Olympia after this for at least a decade even if Hermes begs me.” He reached a stand, shuffling over slowly as air once again found his lungs. (He’d done rather the fit of running.) “Wait…”

Like pulling back a curtain, the magpie had picked the cyclops’s eyelid open.

Laevateinn’s arc left it completely destroyed.

Should you have been listening closely to Loki then, you’d have heard the subtle, but not silent, beginning of a long and drawling coil whine.

“As I said.” The magpie let the eyelid drop. “The Sorcerer Supreme.” Then it flew to again perch on a frozen Loki’s shoulder.

His hand was being drawn down his face.

“And, if a magpie familiar is allowed to comment,” it told him, “He is rather fetching and handsome, isn’t he, Loki—”

Then it was gone, dispelled. “—Stephen Strange is _**not** _handsome.”

Regardless of whatever, the portal that opened destined to the Sanctum Sanctorum did not fizzle in the slightest.

Back into the present.

Loki, for without bottle of bourbon in lording over now, just watched Stephen casual as could be while the latter hit him with that open-faced gape at yours truly having returned so soon from the Negative Zone. (Lazy bastard, by the by—that’d been where he last sent him screaming after he so nicely relinquished Stephen’s mantle of Sorcerer Supreme back to him. Bereft of any iota of creativity, Strange.) He knew that look. It was the look of someone still contemplating of whether or not to banish him a third time. Loki merely said his line and waited for reality to catch up with Strange so he’d might do something beside stare and gape a little more.

As with most things, it happened eventually.

“You’re really doing this.” Stephen was kneading his forehead. “You’re forcing this on me.”

Loki was as salient as ever. “I did tell you that I would owe you. It’s you that has thus far remained mum on any price of which I would exceed in kind, Stephen. Don’t be a heel-dragger. This isn’t even so much an inch out of your wheelhouse and you know it.”

“Oh, Vishanti.” Stephen wore exasperation everywhere. “The Norse god is quoting colloquialisms at me now. Whatever happened to ‘thy mortality is inherent weakness, o simpleton!’, Loki?”

He just smiled. “I got better.”

“Right…” Stephen had seemingly got ahead of the desire to banish him, as he was now staring at the ceiling as if praying to one of his many mystic gods for a release that would, in any case, never come. Loki let him have at it. Lesser men dealt with grief in more uninteresting—and often more violent—ways than this; Stephen on the other hand visibly having his mind all but collapse inward was amusing to watch if nothing else.

“You’ve done it, Loki.” He sounded ready to slough off this mortal coil. “You chose for me, in typical Loki fashion, which is to say making a decision for someone without any concern for them until they either give in or tie a noose to escape you, and I’ve got no rope. Godsdammit.”

Loki found it within him to look more or less sincere.

“I just have to ask,” Stephen went on, “Why this? Why _me?_ I haven’t dealt with the fae in… I don’t even remember at this point. Does Morgan Le Fay count? Sure, I’m Sorcerer Supreme, and the fae are by every measure extremely magical…”

“They are magic personified by desire,” clarified Loki. “As for why, why do you think, Stephen?”

Stephen cleared his throat. “You want to torment me with yourself? You want to, I don’t know, somehow angle your way in with the Avengers, even if I’ve already told you I won’t be bothering with them for a while? You’re chaos. Trying to fathom what goes on behind that thick skull of yours is bad for anyone’s health.”

_You’re chaos._

And every now and again, such chaos could afford itself being brutally honest.

“You’re the only one who’d help and believe me, Stephen.” Loki leaned back into the sofa. “Who else would? My brother? Ha! I might be myself, but I am also acutely aware of where I stand. In spite of our… differences, I also know that whenever the Avengers decide to castigate me as evil himself, you don’t. You never have. Not even at my old self’s worst where even I would have agreed with them. For everything I did in taking your mantle from you, it’s you that understands why.”

He saw Stephen mull it over—turning away as though he was about to run out of his own house even—before, at last, they were sitting across from each other in the Sanctum foyer, Stephen looking for him as you might a shark through glass.

“I don’t understand you. You have these masks, Loki. The ‘I’m a raving megalomaniacal supervillain’ mask. The ‘woe is me, what have I done’ mask. The ‘trickster that cares for nothing of what you think of him’ mask. And that’s just the surface to a big, _big_ damn iceberg. Other heroes see you and think what they do because it’s by far the easiest to conclude. I don’t because it’s my job to think bigger than that. It always has been. You don’t become a sorcerer just reading lines from a book. Still…” He shook his head. “It’s not as though you make it easy to like you. Trust me, you don’t. And that’s a fact.” Stephen began to suggest him with a hand. “So I’m asking you. Not me, not the Avengers, not anyone else but you. Straight from the horse’s mouth.”

“Can I trust you, Loki?”

_Can I trust you, Loki?_

Were there a way to impale a God of Mischief with but one spoken line, this had to be it. Out of everything he would have expected from Strange—the anger, the annoyance, the irritation, even the eventual and beleaguered acceptance—none of that, Loki imagined, would involve sitting down with him and straight out asking the elephant in the room quite like this. His eyes widened, thinned, himself looking away. Maybe it was embarrassment for somehow not thinking this could’ve happened. Maybe it was simple contemplation. Here was what he ended up saying in the end:

“Trust me.”

Against the odds, Stephen seemed genuinely satisfied with that. “Alright. I’m going to trust you. I accept the olive branch, Loki. But so help me, you walk back on this and betray me—”

Loki smirked, facing him back. “You’ll banish me to the Negative Zone and hope third time’s the charm?”

Despite it, they both were laughing.

“I’ll find something worse than that, I promise. Now… with that frankly harrowing conversation out of the way, I should also ask why Stonehenge.”

“Arcadia is a guarded place even for its present woes,” Loki replied. “It has entrances and exits that have existed since time immemorial, but were we to use any of them, the Faerie would be on us in an instant. While I know Arcadia wants me and I have a good idea as for why, it’s impossible to know more about their plans or methods unless we look.”

“And Stonehenge…?”

“Among the few locales on Midgard where the Fade can be persuaded to let us into Arcadia without the Faerie being keen on it. We could scry their realm there without Arcadia staring back.”

“A reconnaissance mission.”

“Simplified terms, but yes.” Loki stood. “And the requisite amount of dreaming.”

Stephen quirked a brow. “Dreaming?”

“Arcadia is no ordinary place, Stephen. It’s one of dreaming and wonder and imagination. The only way to look into it is through the unconscious, even for gods such as myself. Which is where you would play your part. Doctor Strange has always been a master at navigating the unconscious and the astral, are you now?”

“I’ll give you that. Nightmare doesn’t so much as try to spring a bad dream on me anymore, not since I sent him to a nightmare of his own creation.”

“My last interest, before we go.” Loki was smiling coolly. “You happen to have a wallet on you, yes? With, ah, legal tender?”

“Sorcery doesn’t pay out that well unless I started turning lead into gold and crashed the market, but you don’t live in Manhattan without at least some cash…” He spied Loki a look, wordlessly asking for where he had to be going with this. But Loki, maybe against the grain of expectation, had nothing remotely sinister in mind for Stephen’s paper coinage.

Instead, and he said this as he beamed with glee, “Breakfast meats.”

Lower Manhattan.

“I’m feeding a god Denny’s sausage past two in the afternoon.” Stephen’s head was in his hands. “Because this is the only diner still serving breakfast.” His tone bordered on wistful. “Are you done yet, Loki?”

Loki didn’t hear him over the vigor he wielded toward eating. Or devouring, really. “What?”

“Are you done? By Cyttorak, how can you even eat those things, let alone that much? They’re disgusting!”

Loki said nothing in reply—he just smacked his lips and went back to it without so much as a second lost, causing Stephen to eye him with unadulterated horror. It was a useful learning experience for why one should never get between a god and his breakfast meats, though. Loki was by no means a polite eater concerning those poor sausage nuggets, either—Stephen was far from the only pair of eyes bearing silent witness to the devastation being wrought.

“Good grief. You know just how to make a man regret ever being nice to you.” Stephen rubbed his eyes. “And we haven’t even got to England yet. Goodie…”

Finally finishing laying waste to yet another platter (there were two empty plates below this one, for the curious), Loki found his senses and at once stopped leaning so thoroughly into a feral candor as he wiped the remains off on another of his coat’s desiccated sleeves.

He didn’t notice at all he was being stared at.

“Delicious. Simply delicious. I don’t know how you mortals manage it, eating anything else when such an irresistible taste lies before you such as now.” He glanced at Stephen’s plate. “And you haven’t touched any of yours!”

Stephen ignored him to address their waitress, who was beyond relieved that Loki wasn’t the one speaking to her. A bill was left on the table and he couldn’t whip out his wallet fast enough.

“Come on, trickster god.” He got up. “I think enough people have had Denny’s ruined for life.”

Stonehenge.

Spring day in England, an invisible fog smelling both wet and sweet permeated the air when Loki and Stephen materialized on the hills facing out from the monument. The stones, high against a low horizon, were calm. Lights were on for it was just about nightfall in the Isles. And for what neither the eyes nor the nose could perceive, a great energy had been welled up here, dormant for thousands of years. Never once having been pushed, least not successfully.

This was about to change.

“No-one’s here,” observed Stephen. He made it sound odd.

Loki wasn’t bothered in the least. “Fortunately for us. I wouldn’t have wanted to go through calling the tourists all away. Must be the time of day. Whichever.” Then he pulled out a book far too large to have just sat in inner coat pockets.

Stephen caught it immediately. “That’s from my library—you stole it!” Then as if to realize who he was dealing with, he merely let out a resigned sigh. “You could have at least told me. I did ask.”

“You didn’t give me the opportunity. Besides, I’m only borrowing. ‘ _Trust me_ ’, remember?”

Stephen shut his eyes and for a moment his mouth moved like he was going to say something, presumably about how keeping secrets instead of outright telling lies didn’t make Loki any more trustworthy, but nothing came. The latter took the opening to let the book down on the stone altar center to the rest of Stonehenge.

“This would have been easier with that cyclops’s eye,” he muttered.

“You tried to get one?” That seemed to bring him back down to earth. “From where?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” And before Stephen could have said another word Loki put a hand on the book, thrumming with a quiet but steadily growing energy. He found his center and his own eyes began to glow with similar power. Loki’s seidr, for as inconsistent it had become these last few weeks, was right there beside him, tangled web of various clauses and sources and all. Some from Yggdrasil. Some from himself. Others still who had either pledged themselves to Loki or had their magic taken (old hat of his, and one he couldn’t wish away now). Pages of the book were flipping of their own volition, floating in the air.

The stones stirred.

Stephen was thoroughly unnerved. “Okay, Loki. The ritual has started. But could you at least give me stage directions, here? What am I to do?”

“Keep it stable,” Loki said, green magic spilling from the pages of the book and outward to the ring of stones, until a dome was weaved. “When the dream begins.”

“Awfully specific of you.” Stephen at least didn’t interfere. That was as much as Loki could’ve asked for.

His consciousness drifted elsewhere, caught up in the spell. Images exploded in color before his eyes, tinged with countless emotions. The Fade was closing in, attracted by this activity, bringing with it the stuff of wonder and the surreal. It poked and prodded and their reality meld to that of a dream. Loki started to recite. His words were not of any mortal language or Asgardian’s, rather Wyrds made from the Faerie and frightening with meaning. The Fade was nearly there. Beside them now. The dream was coming upon him, and then… and then…

He saw them.

They were staring back.

Loki yelled. “No! They’re here! They know we’re here!”

“Who?” Stephen rushed over. “Who knows, Loki, you have to tell me!”

“The Huntsman…” His voice was horrified but leaving. “The Huntsman. The dreaming is starting, Stephen. I can’t stop it. You have to… find Puck…”

And there they were—Loki in Stephen’s arms, lost in a dream.


	3. We the Hounds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some enterprising readers might notice similarities between this fic and one I wrote last November on an earlier handle (you can find it by searching the Loki/Stephen Strange tag under Marvel (Comics) :wink:). As much as I enjoyed writing that draft, it's absolutely a mess typical of what happens when you write 50k words in the span of a single month. I wrestled myself for a while as to what to do with it between editing and finishing it or straight up abandoning it, and this fic is more or less a re-imagining of that one with better defined character arcs and plot in general. So that's why the similarities!
> 
> Also, this chapter kicked my ass. It took SIX (6) entire rough drafts of different ideas before this one came about, hence the relatively long wait. Hopefully future chapters won't take so much out of me!

A smaller interlude, of when the Sorcerer Supreme had last encountered the Faerie of Arcadia. He wasn’t much Sorcerer Supreme then.

The Kamar-Taj, somewhere in the Himalayas, Tibet.

There were pixies fixing at the Ancient One’s beard.

They were more like wisps, on the whole. What with the soft pastel orbs that enveloped him and hid their tiny bodies, floating aloft on wings beating much too fast to be seen. Stephen identified him only by virtue of having read a glossier of Celtic origin a few weeks before this one, now months and months into his study as a mage at the Taj. Fortunate for us, such that we might not have to tell you the nitty gritty details for how he screamed and yelled to be let out when he first had come here at almost all hours of the day just to be blocked by a convenient blizzard. Although for some like Baron Mordo, annoyance at Stephen’s being here never truly ended with the excision of the screaming. Much less the Ancient One’s fascination with, as he once put it, the “worthless, debased American”.

Anyway, Mordo was talking to him.

“Don’t you think it odd?” He asked. “Just to have them here?”

Stephen quirked a brow. “I don’t know,” he said, honestly. “I mean, I’ve never seen fairies before, but these seem to get on well with the Master.”

“ _Heh._ ” His was a condescending _heh_ , as though Stephen had made an observation that was funny to him, the same kind of funny you would find in someone saying something relentlessly stupid. This was common for him. “They’re buttering him up. Wordlessly bargaining to get him to help with getting their lands back. Faerie are constantly at war with other Faerie in Arcadia, Stephen. These are just the leftovers that ran for Mother. Refugees.”

“Shouldn’t we do it? I don’t see a problem in trying.”

“Of course _**you’re**_ the one to say that. You have no idea of what doing that would entail. Arcadia…” Mordo spat. “…well then, go on, Stephen. Tell the Master of your marvelous plan.”

Stephen had never once claimed to understand why Mordo held him in such transparent contempt. Before, when his most busying concern was finding a way the Hell out of here, it never registered as he was more than a little too preoccupied. And then now after that, he believed that maybe Mordo was simply the type to do that with everybody. But he gossiped aplenty with Wong (not that Wong ever humored him, really) and figured himself as somehow a vizier attached to the Ancient One’s shoulder, whispering at him daily. Yet he spared nothing for Stephen but hate and did everything in his power such that he knew it.

Real class act. Stephen stepped forward to the Ancient One.

“Pixies?” He suggested the wisp-balls with a hand.

“Pixies,” agreed the Ancient One. There was a subtle sprawl of giggling, although not from him. They followed the Ancient One as planetoids would a creator Sun.

And then, for interest of being direct as usual: “Why can’t we help them?”

The Ancient One was cavalier. “Arcadia is a troubling place, even for the Supremes such as myself. It is crafted with everything in magic and yet with none of the humanity. Were you or I to go there, it could mark us forever. It would not be wrong to allude to it as a place of dreams.”

“But you’ve gone there,” insisted Stephen. “You’ve gone everywhere.”

The Ancient One chuckled. “When I was younger, yes, and arrogant. I wanted to, like you, know what made Arcadia so special. But I soon realized that if Arcadia does not invite you, does not _**want**_ you to be there, it transforms itself from dreaming into nightmare such that it might rip you in two. I have long since left it be, as it prefers. It does not enjoy us mortals trampling into its lands very much.”

Stephen nodded, trying to get it. It was frankly bizarre in hearing the Ancient One refer to himself with something as diminutive as _mortal_ —as far as he knew, he was older than three hundred years and wiser than even that—but Arcadia, it seemed, disseminated immortal and mortal to a finer degree not unlike a farmer separating the chaff. He should by any reason fear such a place, and instead found himself fascinated. But why couldn’t the pixies just…?

“You want to know why they can’t live among us in the Taj,” the Ancient One said, as if reading his mind. “In earnest, were that possible I would let them. Arcadia is simply their home. Living with us in reality is tenuous even for the most benign of Faerie. Without Arcadia’s unreality to support them, they will all die eventually.”

“Yet they’re still cleaning your beard.”

“They know this better than us. It pains me to know that lending our aid would be such a dangerous proposition.”

Mordo-on-High, watching them. “Perhaps Stephen should do it. It’s his idea, after all. Let himself see what Arcadia is like for such a novice sorcerer.” He was being sarcastic, evidently.

“No.” The Ancient One didn’t so much as entertain it. “He shall not. The lessons I learned need not be repeated. I will try to find a solution myself. Find it within you to not interfere as you are wont to do, Mordo…”

Mordo, glaring, muttered something to himself and stalked off. The Ancient One turned back to Stephen, winking. Stephen just frowned.

“Why _do_ you keep him here, Master?”

“Mordo is a lost soul. He has already sold it to his dread lord Dormammu. But keeping him here with us is safer than expulsion, where he might actually begin to serve his true master. I try to redeem what’s left of him. You will know my point with time. Do not pay any mind to his bullying, Stephen. He is merely jealous for the attention I lavish onto you.”

_He is merely jealous for the attention I lavish onto you._

Later that night, curtains drawn and door shut, Stephen was trying to open a portal into Arcadia.

He’d drawn the pixies away from the Ancient One by leaving out a bowl of faerie-dust from the Archives, replete with a book of translocation and the confidence that his spell was going to work. He was a gifted talent for portal-slinging, according to the Ancient One, so how much more difficult would it be opening a path between the Taj and a realm with natural connections to Earth? And the pixies, giggling in their way as they restored themselves on the dust, provided ample reason for him to soldier on, reading from the book by way of candlelight.

Stephen started to cant, and his ritual circle chalked out in ink began to glow and glow…

Here was the difficulty—Stephen had succeeded.

He was also promptly thrown from his spot to on his bed by a presence that thundered inside his room as though he had just unleashed a force of nature.

The pixies, instantly alarmed, sprung up to flee, their little orbs all aflutter in the sky. Stephen himself was like ice with fear, not daring to move. They made it barely to the door before that presence, whose true form was but an unknowable glimmer in the dark for Stephen, cornered them. He would hear the shulk, precise and professional, of a spear being thrust, and the clatter of hooves against the floor. Again he did not dare to move. Orb by orb went out, disappeared, until none were left.

Its cruel deed completed, the presence returned toward the portal, and although it did not touch him, it reached. He could have felt it. Then it stopped and excused itself through without so much a word or a sound. The portal collapsed soon after, Stephen himself left wet with a fountain of sweat.

The next morning.

“The American did just as you told him not to do. Look at his face.” Mordo had his arms crossed.

“I know,” said the Ancient One, playing his Go. “He’s learned a valuable lesson, I hope. He should know better now than to erect bridges between our world and ones he does not yet understand. With luck he shall take it to heart, and this need not happen again.”

Mordo, for his part, just scoffed.

Present again, at Stonehenge.

Stephen Strange, now Sorcerer Supreme, was about to make a bridge between our world and another he did not understand.

(Don’t listen so closely to his long string of expletives.)

“ _‘Trust me,’ he says,_ ” Stephen muttered under his breath, lowering Loki to the ground. “Then he knocks himself the Hell out and before that gives me directions worse than useless. Great. Just another Tuesday for one Master of the Mystic Arts, my ass.”

The rest of the monument, Stephen observed, was now coated in a dome of green-gold energy, presumably Loki’s. With the knowledge that whomever these Huntsmen were had to be Faerie at the end of the day and as such weakened while on Earth, he was given the impression that the dome would hold long enough for him to personally yank Loki free of whatever he referred to as the Dreaming and formulate a better plan than this one before Arcadia _really_ shoved them up shit creek without a paddle.

He was, naturally, being generous.

Regardless, he’d promised to Loki that he would help him and now, what with the latter now motionless on the grass, he ought as well have become a patient of Stephen’s. And he did not ever make a habit for abandoning patients no matter how he felt or thought about the content of their character. (Or how he swore himself several swear jars’ worth in the span of a few minutes.) Still, this was, shall we say, less than ideal. They were getting off on just the _best foot_ since Loki went full supervillain with the Dark Celestials, weren’t they?

“I’m going to regret this,” said Stephen though he could’ve been possibly talking about the future and not right now, then fired off the spell that would make the two of them for sorcerers whose physical bodies lied knocked the Hell out at the basin of an English holy sight.

He opened his eyes and was in a void.

The void was neither cold nor warm, and when Stephen tried to walk he realized he couldn’t as there was no solid ground beneath him, instead having to rely on the Cloak of Levitation—at least his astral version of it—to right himself and collect his bearings.

What was he doing out in a void?

This had to be Loki’s mindscape, Stephen thought, searching around with his eyes for anything out here for a few minutes. A void didn’t exactly score high on the list for what he would’ve expected to see charging headlong into the astral conscious of a literal god, let alone one as chaotic as Loki. Some more searching followed before he found the silhouette to, of all things, a boy out there in the void with him. He turned around and met Stephen’s gaze.

“Hi.”

 _Um._ Stephen cleared his throat. “Hello…”

His face was a younger version of Loki’s, wearing spandex and a white hood over his head. It took a raking of the brain for a second and it clicked, Stephen recognizing him as Kid Loki, the Loki who had reincarnated after the death of the original at the hands of the capital V Void at the Siege of Asgard some decade ago. He who, if Stephen remembered the memo correctly, had died and been replaced by the Loki everyone was oh-so familiar with now.

“He’s out there,” Kid Loki said. “Are you going to go get him?”

“That’s the plan, yes. You’re…”

“Not who I look like,” Kid Loki lamented, looking away. “The real me is dead. I’m just his subconscious. Or conscience. I don’t think there’s a difference, really.”

“Sorry for disturbing you.” He didn’t know if there was anything else to say. “I… uh. If you could lead me to him, that would be wonderful. The void is… expansive.”

“He likes it that way, keeping me apart from him as much as possible. But he’s in a nightmare right now, so guess I win.” Kid Loki smiled, however it’d been hollow. “Do you want to know his real name?”

“Should I?” Stephen was sincere.

Kid Loki just hummed. “Ikol. That’s his real name. It could be important sometime soon, but I don’t really know why. Ikol-Loki… the one that came back.”

“There are a lot of you.”

“We’re constantly changing. Dying’s the easy way to do it. He killed real-me because he wanted to live, you know. He didn’t like just being real-me’s familiar. But he felt bad about it and changed again. Now he’s struggling to stay that way, because destiny keeps calling on him to be like old-us that we both hate.”

Stephen was quiet.

“Anyway, you’ve got to go get him, I get it. Sorry for keeping you.” Kid Loki stood and snapped his fingers, opening a rift to another place. “Bring him back here from that nightmare, he’ll come to his senses. Then we should probably get out of here in the Fade. Arcadia’s coming.”

“I’m aware. Thank you… Loki.” Stephen approached the rift. Kid Loki smiled at him, better that time, and waved him on.

Loki’s nightmare:

“All hail the King of Endings!”

“All hail!”

“There he is, the King of Endings! Our savior! He has saved us all from a life of living!”

“All hail!”

In a ruined dream-Asgardia, although not that removed in desolation from Asgardia of reality.

Those were their words. But this was what they were really saying—

See those ruined buildings, whose rubble no longer carried so much as a hint of their original, glittering gold? See us, our skeletons, we the chattering husks of once were regular, common Asgardians? Do you not remember, Loki Laufeyson, when your past self sold us out to Victor Von Doom such that he’d turn us into terrible, terrible creatures, removed of all save our most vital parts attached to machines to function as minions for his machinations simply for that Doom would pay you back with a high enough price? Listen now! Listen! It is us that call to you, Loki! We do not curse you, fear your name—we have crowned you, _**crowned**_ you! We worship you, us the dead and the dying? Was it not from your loins that sprung our Goddess of Death? Was it not you, the original for all our endings? Is it not your name, and yours alone, that brings about the final conclusion of us all? And it sounded like this— _Ragnarök…_

“The age of gods has ended! We are no more! We are forever and forever is death! Hail him, our king!”

“All hail!”

Loki ran.

Knowing it, knowing everything he ran. He ran as fast as his imaginary dream legs would have him, faster than even that cyclops got him in reality. But there was no part of this Asgardia that would have the walls rise and the countryside begin. Here there were naught but the ruins and the skeletons, joined in their reverence, and this brought Loki to scream. He screamed in trying to drown them out such that he would not hear anymore of this. He couldn’t stand it. But it was the screaming that subsided, not their calling, and his screaming became so quiet it wouldn’t have disturbed a mouse. They kept calling to him. They bowed and knelt and watched with their eyeless holes, while his were nothing more than silent lines on a page.

Stephen was in awe.

It was hard to not have been captured with the assumption that this had been somehow part of Loki’s plan—getting Stephen to trust him, Arcadia, forcing his hand to enter his mind. As far as Stephen was aware, or any other Avenger-adjacent was aware, everything had to be a part of Loki’s plan. To believe otherwise was to open yourself as becoming a pawn in that plan, as Stephen feared he’d done for as much Loki liked to posit himself as a creature of improvisation and circumstance, the truth was always buried somewhere between all that scheming. But this?

This had nothing to do with that.

Here was god trying to outrun himself and doing so in vain. The skeletons, ignoring Stephen in favor of their anointed king, inadvertently gave himself the space necessary to fly out with the Cloak and catch up for how fast Loki had been going. Nothing coming to mind for how to show him he was here between the skeletons making such awful noise and Loki’s own foray at trying to blot it out, Stephen figured the direct approach was the only way to stop him before Loki tried anything drastic. He flew ahead—no short feat—and landed, arms out.

Unsurprisingly, Loki was fast, but not that fast. He couldn’t swerve before Stephen had grabbed him as you would a thrashing, wet trout.

“You’re okay,” Stephen said. “I’ve got you.”

Loki, either not hearing him or not caring, thrashed the more. Stephen opened the rift from earlier to launch them both back into Kid Loki’s void lest Loki be given the chance to break free and make this even more complicated.

Stephen had to hold him until he realized the nightmare was done and over.

“Don’t touch me.” He pushed Stephen off him. “Who do you think you are?”

“Someone that just saved a god from himself,” Stephen replied, taking his arms away. “Don’t say thank you—I know it won’t be sincere. We’re in your subconscious. You better be ready to finally tell me what we have to do here, Loki. I don’t have the patience for another cryptic witticism.”

Loki huffed, crossing his arms. “I didn’t intend for the Dreaming to go like this. The Fade tricked me. We can either go into Arcadia now or figure something else out, but Arcadia will know either way.”

“From the way you describe Arcadia, my preference is not going into it guns blazing.”

It was around then that Loki noticed Kid Loki and Kid Loki in turn noticed him; they watched one another, yet did not address each other. Stephen thought of this as a blessing in disguise. He might not know what Loki-on-Loki conversation was like, but he couldn’t spare the time to find out, either.

“The Huntsmen will be at Stonehenge soon, I imagine, to take our physical bodies. We must defend ourselves before we do anything else. If they got a hold of us, it will be grim, and that’s putting it mildly.”

“Your body, you mean. They wouldn’t want anything to do with mine.”

Loki pursed his lips. “ _ **W-e-e-e-ll…**_ ”

Stephen just stared. After requisite pause for effect, “You’re kidding.”

“It was a necessary part of the ritual,” countered Loki. “I would have been stuck in the Fade like that had it been otherwise, and it is temporary. Anyway, it will take me a moment before I can collect enough power to reunite us with our bodies, so spare me any ranting and raving, Stephen. I have work to be doing.” His arm flexed forward and out spindled a portent viewing Stonehenge, maybe to preoccupy him. Stephen wouldn’t have thought anything of it—he was too busy fuming that Loki would’ve done something as reckless and stupid as _binding their souls together_ without so much as a friendly word of caution until after the fact—but what he saw there in that portent consumed his full attention.

The Huntsmen weren’t converging on Stonehenge.

They were already there.

Back at the Sanctorum, a little past two.

“Ah, jeez. Boss got himself tangled up with that no-good god again, didn’t he.”

This was Bats.

Bats was a ghost basset hound, formerly of the real and fleshy and pettable variety before—as an old, fifteen year old dog—got taken out with a heart attack trying to defend his master, Stephen Strange, from the aforementioned no-good god named Loki who’d stolen his master’s former title and reputation, forcing him to become a veterinarian in the interim and adopting Bats along the way. Loki felt guilty about this and with sympathy for Stephen (proving that, at last, Loki could prove he had any capacity for such a thing) and resurrected Bats in the form he was in now. Ectoplasmy and able to phase through walls and everything. Turned out being a ghost wasn’t so bad. Even came in handy when Mephisto raised Hell on Vegas and Bats had to possess a possessed Stephen and… yeah. Bats didn’t like to talk about Damnation.

“Guess that means no walkies for me. I should probably get Zelma before he’s in real bad trouble.”

Bats trotted out through the Sanctum door and into the greater Manhattan crawl, destined for a lonelier looking flat at the cheaper rung of Greenwich.

Zelma Stanton had been listening to smooth jazz when Bats scared her half to death phasing through the carpet just as she’d gotten up to change the vinyl.

“Oops. Sorry. Couldn’t ring the doorbell,” apologized Bats, sniffing her gently.

Zelma, collecting her heart from the floor, just nodded slowly. “It’s alright. Wasn’t expecting you is all.” She did change that vinyl now though, and went on over to sit in her loveseat. A stack of books towered from there to the ceiling beside her. Some were Hemingway, others Kant, at least one was Nabokov, and the rest were from authors that wrote their names in runes or inscriptions if they wrote them at all.

“Stephen’s got himself in trouble again, hasn’t he.”

“Yup. Our pal Loki paid him a visit.”

“Oh.”

They shared a moment of mutual silence.

“You’re going to have to explain this in a little more detail, Bats.”

“Sure. Got any bacon?”

And this was how Zelma wound up feeding a ghost dog reheated bacon from her fridge, listening to Bats as he told her the story. After, she found herself not that impressed. She knew Stephen could be headstrong (and something of a genius-idiot) sometimes, but she honestly thought better of him than to be going around and taking obvious bait from Loki. Especially so soon after that bastard had played the both of them like a fiddle with that whole deal about tricking Stephen out of his title. Sure, Loki did use it to restart the Dragon Lines that gave Earth its magic back, but he was also the Liar to End All Liars and kissed Zelma on the lips just to ditch her like he never knew here afterward. Not to mention her catching Stephen himself in a lie and leaving…

Zelma sighed.

“We’re going to have to help him.”

“Yeah.”

“…” She reached down and pet Bats, for as well as ghost dogs could be pet. “You’re a very good dog, Bats. Stephen is lucky to have you.”

“Don’t I know it. Why do you think he said yes to Loki? I thought they hated each other.”

“They do hate each other, last I knew. But I guess he saw something none of us did in him. I should call Wong, but…”

She didn’t really want to ruin Wong’s peaceful life outside of Stephen. Sure, they both helped him out one way or the other when Loki became Sorcerer Supreme, and she and Wong talked on the phone almost every week just to keep up, but Wong was happy not having to be at Doctor Strange’s beck and call anymore. They were friends that were better off having gone their own way. Like she had. Until now, she supposed, with some amount of exhaustion.

“…let’s see if we can figure this out ourselves, okay?”

Zelma got up, turned off the vinyl player, put on her coat and thanked herself she still had the keys to the Sanctum from when Stephen had given them to her as his apprentice-librarian. Bats got his walkies after all. And after much thorough searching and running up and down stairs ripped straight ouf of an MC Escher painting—

“There has got to be a door in here somewhere that leads to Stonehenge. There’s a door here for everything!”

“Try the one on the left.”

“Good grief.” Unlatching the key, Zelma went over and sure enough, that was definitely England’s rolling hills fanning out from the frame of the doorway. “Next time, I’m not neglecting translocation books. Coming with me, Bats?”

“Uh-huh. You got the sword?”

“Hopefully won’t have to use it, but yeah.”

They stepped outside into a clear clip of wet grassland, Zelma lighting her lantern to see in the ebbing light. “So you think something’s happened to them here?” She asked, regarding Bats.

“Can’t think of any other explanation. The Doc was none too happy about Loki being there and askin’ him for help. No way he’d spend any time with him unless he had to. Course, I hope he’s alright and everything’s fine, but I just gotta bad feeling.”

“That’s fair. Looks like Stonehenge is just ahead. Hey, is that… Loki’s magic?”

“Umm.” Bats was frozen in his tracks. “Zelma?”

“What is it?”

“Can’t you see that?”

“See what, Bats? Be specific.”

“Well… don’t look now, but I’m pretty sure that’s a small army of centaurs with stags for heads surrounding that dome. They got a lotta spears. And I think they see us.”

“… Oh.”

 


End file.
